The Robots Are Coming! But Not For a While.

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Things are slow this morning, so I’m going to rail against one of my pet peeves: analogies to the Industrial Revolution as evidence that robots won’t reduce employment. My victim today is Heather Long at Wonkblog:

History suggests new jobs will replace old ones. As the Industrial Revolution demonstrated, technological transformations create new jobs no one has thought of yet. The same trend appears to be happening today.

Companies shed workers during the Great Recession and rapidly tried to cut costs, including by introducing more machines on assembly lines and in fast casual restaurants like Panera, where you can now order on a touch screen. Yet even with those trends, the U.S. economy has added more than 16.4 million jobs since the low point for employment in December 2009.

“Tom Cotton is woefully misinformed,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. “Robots will create more jobs.” Brusuelas points out that many of the fastest-growing jobs today, such as “user design” and “cloud engineers,” weren’t around a decade ago. We like to talk about how robots kill jobs, but we tend to talk a lot less about how many other jobs are being created in the economy.

Ah yes: user design and cloud engineers. All those displaced truck drivers will just transition into Silicon Valley engineering jobs. Sure they will.

We have had one (1) “technological transformation” in recent human history. It did, eventually, create new jobs for the class of workers¹ who had been displaced. However, this sample size of one provides no evidence that all technological transformations will work the same way.

In fact, it’s vanishingly unlikely that the AI Revolution will work the same way as the Industrial Revolution. The latter displaced human muscle power, but all those machines still had to be run by humans with brains. That’s where the new jobs came from. The AI Revolution will displace human brainpower, and that means there will be nothing left for most humans to do. If a robot is both mentally and physically equal (or superior) to a human being, then by definition they can do whatever a human can do. We don’t have to argue one by one about every job category, or even think about every possible new job that might be created in their place. The answer to all of them is: robots will do that too.

Now, if you don’t think AI will ever get to human level, that’s fine. Then the AI Revolution will never happen. I’d still argue that enough of it will happen to cause considerable upheaval, but now we’re in a technological argument. What happens, for example, if AI and robotics get smart enough to perform all unskilled and semiskilled labor, but never advance further than that? We won’t have 100 percent unemployment, but we’ll have 30-40 percent unemployment, and that strikes me as still a big enough problem to worry about.

However, if you accept that AI will eventually get to human level, then yes, robots will take all our jobs. And they’ll take all the new jobs too.

As for Cotton, though, he’s also wrong. There’s no conflict between the American economy needing more workers in the short term but being in danger of having too many workers in the longer term. Today we’re short of workers. In 20 years we’ll be wondering what to do with all the workers we have. There’s no reason to think those two things are in tension.

¹I say “class of workers” because many of the actual workers displaced by the Industrial Revolution were indeed put out of jobs. It was only later that other jobs cropped up to replace them. Workers of similar skill levels then took those jobs, but that was no help to the original folks who had lost their livelihoods.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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